OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Safe physical HRI: Toward a unified treatment of speed and separation monitoring together with power and force limiting
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2020
Year: 2020

So-called collaborative robots are a current trend in industrial robotics. However, they still face many problems in practical application such as reduced speed to ascertain their collaborativeness. The standards prescribe two regimes: (i) speed and separation monitoring and (ii) power and force limiting, where the former requires reliable estimation of distances between the robot and human body parts and the latter imposes constraints on the energy absorbed during collisions prior to robot stopping. Following the standards, we deploy the two collaborative regimes in a single application and study the performance in a mock collaborative task under the individual regimes, including transitions between them. Additionally, we compare the performance under "safety zone monitoring" with keypoint pair-wise separation distance assessment relying on an RGB-D sensor and skeleton extraction algorithm to track human body parts in the workspace. Best performance has been achieved in the following setting: robot operates at full speed until a distance threshold between any robot and human body part is crossed; then, reduced robot speed per power and force limiting is triggered. Robot is halted only when the operator's head crosses a predefined distance from selected robot parts. We demonstrate our methodology on a setup combining a KUKA LBR iiwa robot, Intel RealSense RGB-D sensor and OpenPose for human pose estimation.
Completing and Debugging Ontologies: state of the art and challenges
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

As semantically-enabled applications require high-quality ontologies, developing and maintaining ontologies that are as correct and complete as possible is an important although difficult task in ontology engineering. A key step is ontology debugging and completion. In general, there are two steps: detecting defects and repairing defects. In this paper we discuss the state of the art regarding the repairing step. We do this by formalizing the repairing step as an abduction problem and situating the state of the art with respect to this framework. We show that there are still many open research problems and show opportunities for further work and advancing the field.
Universal Adversarial Audio Perturbations
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We demonstrate the existence of universal adversarial perturbations, which can fool a family of audio classification architectures, for both targeted and untargeted attack scenarios. We propose two methods for finding such perturbations. The first method is based on an iterative, greedy approach that is well-known in computer vision: it aggregates small perturbations to the input so as to push it to the decision boundary. The second method, which is the main contribution of this work, is a novel penalty formulation, which finds targeted and untargeted universal adversarial perturbations. Differently from the greedy approach, the penalty method minimizes an appropriate objective function on a batch of samples. Therefore, it produces more successful attacks when the number of training samples is limited. Moreover, we provide a proof that the proposed penalty method theoretically converges to a solution that corresponds to universal adversarial perturbations. We also demonstrate that it is possible to provide successful attacks using the penalty method when only one sample from the target dataset is available for the attacker. Experimental results on attacking various 1D CNN architectures have shown attack success rates higher than 85.0% and 83.1% for targeted and untargeted attacks, respectively using the proposed penalty method.
A localized version of the basic triangle theorem
Venue: arXiv cs.SC 2020
Year: 2020

In this short note, we give a localized version of the basic triangle theorem, first published in 2011 (see [4]) in order to prove the independence of hyperlogarithms over various function fields. This version provides direct access to rings of scalars and avoids the recourse to fraction fields as that of meromorphic functions for instance.
Physical Layer Secret Key Generation in Static Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

Two legitimate parties, referred to as Alice and Bob, wish to generate secret keys from the wireless channel in the presence of an eavesdropper, referred to as Eve, in order to use such keys for encryption and decryption. In general, the secret key rate highly depends on the coherence time of the channel. In particular, a straightforward method of generating secret keys in static environments results in ultra-low rates. In order to resolve this problem, we introduce a low-complexity method called induced randomness. In this method, Alice and Bob independently generate local randomness to be used together with the uniqueness of the wireless channel coefficients in order to enable high-rate secret key generation. In this work, two scenarios are considered: first, when Alice and Bob share a direct communication channel, and second, when Alice and Bob do not have a direct link and communicate through an untrusted relay. After exchanging the induced randomness, post-processing is done by Alice and Bob to generate highly-correlated samples that are used for the key generation. Such samples are then converted into bits, disparities between the sequences generated by Alice and Bob are mitigated, and the resulting sequences are then hashed to compensate for the information leakage to the eavesdropper and to allow consistency checking of the generated key bit sequences. We utilize semantic security measures and information-theoretic inequalities to upper bound the probability of successful eavesdropping attack in terms of the mutual information measures that can be numerically computed. Given certain reasonable system parameters this bound is numerically evaluated to be $2^{-31}$ and $2^{-10.57}$ in the first and the second scenario, respectively.
Large-Scale Traffic Signal Control Using a Novel Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Finding the optimal signal timing strategy is a difficult task for the problem of large-scale traffic signal control (TSC). Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is a promising method to solve this problem. However, there is still room for improvement in extending to large-scale problems and modeling the behaviors of other agents for each individual agent. In this paper, a new MARL, called Cooperative double Q-learning (Co-DQL), is proposed, which has several prominent features. It uses a highly scalable independent double Q-learning method based on double estimators and the UCB policy, which can eliminate the over-estimation problem existing in traditional independent Q-learning while ensuring exploration. It uses mean field approximation to model the interaction among agents, thereby making agents learn a better cooperative strategy. In order to improve the stability and robustness of the learning process, we introduce a new reward allocation mechanism and a local state sharing method. In addition, we analyze the convergence properties of the proposed algorithm. Co-DQL is applied on TSC and tested on a multi-traffic signal simulator. According to the results obtained on several traffic scenarios, Co- DQL outperforms several state-of-the-art decentralized MARL algorithms. It can effectively shorten the average waiting time of the vehicles in the whole road system.
New Constructions of Subspace Codes Using Subsets of MRD codes in Several Blocks
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

A basic problem for the constant dimension subspace coding is to determine the maximal possible size A_q (n, d, k) of a set of k-dimensional subspaces in Fnq such that the subspace distance satisfies d(U, V )> or =d for any two different subspaces U andV in this set. We present two new constructions of constant dimension subspace codes using subsets of maximal rank-distance (MRD) codes in several blocks. This method is firstly applied to the linkage construction and secondly to arbitrary number of blocks of lifting MRD codes. In these two constructions, subsets of MRD codes with bounded ranks play an essential role. The Delsarte theorem of the rank distribution of MRD codes is an important ingredient to count codewords in our constructed constant dimension subspace codes. We give many new lower bounds for A_q (n, d, k). More than 110 new constant dimension subspace codes better than previously best known codes are constructed.
Delving into Robust Object Detection from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: A Deep Nuisance Disentanglement Approach
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Object detection from images captured by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is becoming increasingly useful. Despite the great success of the generic object detection methods trained on ground-to-ground images, a huge performance drop is observed when they are directly applied to images captured by UAVs. The unsatisfactory performance is owing to many UAV-specific nuisances, such as varying flying altitudes, adverse weather conditions, dynamically changing viewing angles, etc. Those nuisances constitute a large number of fine-grained domains, across which the detection model has to stay robust. Fortunately, UAVs will record meta-data that depict those varying attributes, which are either freely available along with the UAV images, or can be easily obtained. We propose to utilize those free meta-data in conjunction with associated UAV images to learn domain-robust features via an adversarial training framework dubbed Nuisance Disentangled Feature Transform (NDFT), for the specific challenging problem of object detection in UAV images, achieving a substantial gain in robustness to those nuisances. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm, by showing state-of-the-art performance (single model) on two existing UAV-based object detection benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/TAMU-VITA/UAV-NDFT.
Temporally Discounted Differential Privacy for Evolving Datasets on an Infinite Horizon
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

We define discounted differential privacy, as an alternative to (conventional) differential privacy, to investigate privacy of evolving datasets, containing time series over an unbounded horizon. We use privacy loss as a measure of the amount of information leaked by the reports at a certain fixed time. We observe that privacy losses are weighted equally across time in the definition of differential privacy, and therefore the magnitude of privacy-preserving additive noise must grow without bound to ensure differential privacy over an infinite horizon. Motivated by the discounted utility theory within the economics literature, we use exponential and hyperbolic discounting of privacy losses across time to relax the definition of differential privacy under continual observations. This implies that privacy losses in distant past are less important than the current ones to an individual. We use discounted differential privacy to investigate privacy of evolving datasets using additive Laplace noise and show that the magnitude of the additive noise can remain bounded under discounted differential privacy. We illustrate the quality of privacy-preserving mechanisms satisfying discounted differential privacy on smart-meter measurement time-series of real households, made publicly available by Ausgrid (an Australian electricity distribution company).
Coded trace reconstruction in a constant number of traces
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

The coded trace reconstruction problem asks to construct a code $C\subset \{0,1\}^n$ such that any $x\in C$ is recoverable from independent outputs ("traces") of $x$ from a binary deletion channel (BDC). We present binary codes of rate $1-\varepsilon$ that are efficiently recoverable from ${\exp(O_q(\log^{1/3}(\frac{1}{\varepsilon})))}$ (a constant independent of $n$) traces of a $\operatorname{BDC}_q$ for any constant deletion probability $q\in(0,1)$. We also show that, for rate $1-\varepsilon$ binary codes, $\tilde Ω(\log^{5/2}(1/\varepsilon))$ traces are required. The results follow from a pair of black-box reductions that show that average-case trace reconstruction is essentially equivalent to coded trace reconstruction. We also show that there exist codes of rate $1-\varepsilon$ over an $O_{\varepsilon}(1)$-sized alphabet that are recoverable from $O(\log(1/\varepsilon))$ traces, and that this is tight.
Hyperedge Estimation using Polylogarithmic Subset Queries
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2020
Year: 2020

In this work, we estimate the number of hyperedges in a hypergraph ${\cal H}(U({\cal H}), {\cal F}({\cal H}))$, where $U({\cal H})$ denotes the set of vertices and ${\cal F}({\cal H}))$ denotes the set of hyperedges. We assume a query oracle access to the hypergraph ${\cal H}$. Estimating the number of edges, triangles or small subgraphs in a graph is a well studied problem. Beame \etal~and Bhattacharya \etal~gave algorithms to estimate the number of edges and triangles in a graph using queries to the {\sc Bipartite Independent Set} ({\sc BIS}) and the {\sc Tripartite Independent Set} ({\sc TIS}) oracles, respectively. We generalize the earlier works by estimating the number of hyperedges using a query oracle, known as the {\bf Generalized $d$-partite independent set oracle ({\sc GPIS})}, that takes $d$ (non-empty) pairwise disjoint subsets of vertices $A_1,\ldots,A_d \subseteq U({\cal H})$ as input, and answers whether there exists a hyperedge in ${\cal H}$ having (exactly) one vertex in each $A_i, i \in \{1,2,\ldots,d\}$. We give a randomized algorithm for the hyperedge estimation problem using the {\sc GPIS} query oracle to output $\widehat{m}$ for $m({\cal H})$ satisfying $(1-ε) \cdot m({\cal H}) \leq \widehat{m} \leq (1+ε) \cdot m({\cal H})$. The number of queries made by our algorithm, assuming $d$ to be a constant, is polylogarithmic in the number of vertices of the hypergraph.
Secure Coded Multi-Party Computation for Massive Matrix Operations
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper, we consider a secure multi-party computation problem (MPC), where the goal is to offload the computation of an arbitrary polynomial function of some massive private matrices (inputs) to a cluster of workers. The workers are not reliable. Some of them may collude to gain information about the input data (semi-honest workers). The system is initialized by sharing a (randomized) function of each input matrix to each server. Since the input matrices are massive, each share's size is assumed to be at most $1/k$ fraction of the input matrix, for some $k \in \mathbb{N}$. The objective is to minimize the number of workers needed to perform the computation task correctly, such that even if an arbitrary subset of $t-1$ workers, for some $t \in \mathbb{N}$, collude, they cannot gain any information about the input matrices. We propose a sharing scheme, called \emph{polynomial sharing}, and show that it admits basic operations such as adding and multiplication of matrices and transposing a matrix. By concatenating the procedures for basic operations, we show that any polynomial function of the input matrices can be calculated, subject to the problem constraints. We show that the proposed scheme can offer order-wise gain in terms of the number of workers needed, compared to the approaches formed by the concatenation of job splitting and conventional MPC approaches.
Enforcing Perceptual Consistency on Generative Adversarial Networks by Using the Normalised Laplacian Pyramid Distance
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

In recent years there has been a growing interest in image generation through deep learning. While an important part of the evaluation of the generated images usually involves visual inspection, the inclusion of human perception as a factor in the training process is often overlooked. In this paper we propose an alternative perceptual regulariser for image-to-image translation using conditional generative adversarial networks (cGANs). To do so automatically (avoiding visual inspection), we use the Normalised Laplacian Pyramid Distance (NLPD) to measure the perceptual similarity between the generated image and the original image. The NLPD is based on the principle of normalising the value of coefficients with respect to a local estimate of mean energy at different scales and has already been successfully tested in different experiments involving human perception. We compare this regulariser with the originally proposed L1 distance and note that when using NLPD the generated images contain more realistic values for both local and global contrast. We found that using NLPD as a regulariser improves image segmentation accuracy on generated images as well as improving two no-reference image quality metrics.
Differentially Private Link Prediction With Protected Connections
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2020
Year: 2020

Link prediction (LP) algorithms propose to each node a ranked list of nodes that are currently non-neighbors, as the most likely candidates for future linkage. Owing to increasing concerns about privacy, users (nodes) may prefer to keep some of their connections protected or private. Motivated by this observation, our goal is to design a differentially private LP algorithm, which trades off between privacy of the protected node-pairs and the link prediction accuracy. More specifically, we first propose a form of differential privacy on graphs, which models the privacy loss only of those node-pairs which are marked as protected. Next, we develop DPLP , a learning to rank algorithm, which applies a monotone transform to base scores from a non-private LP system, and then adds noise. DPLP is trained with a privacy induced ranking loss, which optimizes the ranking utility for a given maximum allowed level of privacy leakage of the protected node-pairs. Under a recently-introduced latent node embedding model, we present a formal trade-off between privacy and LP utility. Extensive experiments with several real-life graphs and several LP heuristics show that DPLP can trade off between privacy and predictive performance more effectively than several alternatives.
R3Det: Refined Single-Stage Detector with Feature Refinement for Rotating Object
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Rotation detection is a challenging task due to the difficulties of locating the multi-angle objects and separating them effectively from the background. Though considerable progress has been made, for practical settings, there still exist challenges for rotating objects with large aspect ratio, dense distribution and category extremely imbalance. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end refined single-stage rotation detector for fast and accurate object detection by using a progressive regression approach from coarse to fine granularity. Considering the shortcoming of feature misalignment in existing refined single-stage detector, we design a feature refinement module to improve detection performance by getting more accurate features. The key idea of feature refinement module is to re-encode the position information of the current refined bounding box to the corresponding feature points through pixel-wise feature interpolation to realize feature reconstruction and alignment. For more accurate rotation estimation, an approximate SkewIoU loss is proposed to solve the problem that the calculation of SkewIoU is not derivable. Experiments on three popular remote sensing public datasets DOTA, HRSC2016, UCAS-AOD as well as one scene text dataset ICDAR2015 show the effectiveness of our approach. Tensorflow and Pytorch version codes are available at https://github.com/Thinklab-SJTU/R3Det_Tensorflow and https://github.com/SJTU-Thinklab-Det/r3det-on-mmdetection, and R3Det is also integrated in our open source rotation detection benchmark: https://github.com/yangxue0827/RotationDetection.
Counting Immutable Beans: Reference Counting Optimized for Purely Functional Programming
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2020
Year: 2020

Most functional languages rely on some garbage collection for automatic memory management. They usually eschew reference counting in favor of a tracing garbage collector, which has less bookkeeping overhead at runtime. On the other hand, having an exact reference count of each value can enable optimizations, such as destructive updates. We explore these optimization opportunities in the context of an eager, purely functional programming language. We propose a new mechanism for efficiently reclaiming memory used by nonshared values, reducing stress on the global memory allocator. We describe an approach for minimizing the number of reference counts updates using borrowed references and a heuristic for automatically inferring borrow annotations. We implemented all these techniques in a new compiler for an eager and purely functional programming language with support for multi-threading. Our preliminary experimental results demonstrate our approach is competitive and often outperforms state-of-the-art compilers.
Task Bench: A Parameterized Benchmark for Evaluating Parallel Runtime Performance
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

We present Task Bench, a parameterized benchmark designed to explore the performance of parallel and distributed programming systems under a variety of application scenarios. Task Bench lowers the barrier to benchmarking multiple programming systems by making the implementation for a given system orthogonal to the benchmarks themselves: every benchmark constructed with Task Bench runs on every Task Bench implementation. Furthermore, Task Bench's parameterization enables a wide variety of benchmark scenarios that distill the key characteristics of larger applications. We conduct a comprehensive study with implementations of Task Bench in 15 programming systems on up to 256 Haswell nodes of the Cori supercomputer. We introduce a novel metric, minimum effective task granularity to study the baseline runtime overhead of each system. We show that when running at scale, 100 μs is the smallest granularity that even the most efficient systems can reliably support with current technologies. We also study each system's scalability, ability to hide communication and mitigate load imbalance.
Bidirectional Typing
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2020
Year: 2020

Bidirectional typing combines two modes of typing: type checking, which checks that a program satisfies a known type, and type synthesis, which determines a type from the program. Using checking enables bidirectional typing to support features for which inference is undecidable; using synthesis enables bidirectional typing to avoid the large annotation burden of explicitly typed languages. In addition, bidirectional typing improves error locality. We highlight the design principles that underlie bidirectional type systems, survey the development of bidirectional typing from the prehistoric period before Pierce and Turner's local type inference to the present day, and provide guidance for future investigations.
Challenges in Survey Research
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2020
Year: 2020

While being an important and often used research method, survey research has been less often discussed on a methodological level in empirical software engineering than other types of research. This chapter compiles a set of important and challenging issues in survey research based on experiences with several large-scale international surveys. The chapter covers theory building, sampling, invitation and follow-up, statistical as well as qualitative analysis of survey data and the usage of psychometrics in software engineering surveys.